IN CONCERT PERFORMANCE

By
Nikolai Dezhnev Nan S. Talese
; 266 pages; $23.95
For many generations, heroic writers of fiction have emerged from the turbulent vastness of Russia. These are novelists not known for merely perfecting their sentences and telling good stories. Rather, they have written as if compelled by extraordinary circumstances to take on the most urgent of human concerns: crime and punishment, war and peace.

Confirming the continued fertility of Mother Russia is Nikolai Dezhnev. His book, "In Concert Performance," published in Russia in 1995 and just now appearing in the United States, suggests the vitality of a post-Soviet literature full of ambition and wit.

With "In Concert Performance" Dezhnev takes on grand themes and develops them extravagantly. He tackles history, the power of love in a fallen world, the nature of time and the eternal struggle between good and evil. The book's episodes alternate between historical scenes played out by mortal humans, and mythlike dramas whose actors are spirits or demons. Mischief, malice, a longing for grace and the mysteries of love animate Dezhnev's characters.

The book's protagonist is Lukary, a bright soul well on his way to enlightenment, but now in exile for some transgression in a recent incarnation. He is seen near the beginning of the book in his study, located in a place reachable from Earth only through a fissure in the astral plane.

There, amid old oil paintings and golden- spined folios, he reads philosophy, contemplates his destiny and devises a complex scheme to redeem himself. His plan will require him to travel to Earth and find again the mechanical clockwork he had discovered accidentally in an earlier life in Russia, a clockwork responsible for time itself.

Eventually, Lukary's search makes necessary his return to the Moscow of 1932, where he appears as a White Russian determined to do battle against what he believes is absolute evil, as well as to meet and love -- in corporeal form -- a woman named Anna. Lukary's fellow players are a colorful lot. There is Lucy, a fashionable prostitute with the large eyes of a rusalka, a Russian water sprite. She sleeps with foreigners while the state and its bureaucrats act as her pimp. "I'm the anvil on which foreign currency is forged for the land of the Soviets," she says. There's the unscrupulous Shepetukha, a goblin whose natural habitat is swamps and forests, who is dispatched to spy on Lukary. There is the Cardinal of Dark Powers, here imagined as possessed of enough flair to choose a castle in Spain built of living rock as the site for interviews with his minions, and then to insist that they dress as knights and courtiers.

Finally there is Anna's husband, a physicist driven to near insanity by the formula of a "double loop, written in gold and black -- of paramount importance and still unknown to anyone," which he thinks will explain the world and win him glory.

The cast appears in different guises at various times, within history and without, as Dezhnev imagines the primordial battle between good and evil as a contest played by the rules of a well-run Soviet bureaucracy leavened with elements of Christian cosmology, Eastern mysticism and ancient stoicism.

While Dezhnev's forays into religious philosophy at times border on the simplistic, his reliance on the inner workings of Stalinist Russia to ex plain the world's wickedness bristles with sly humor: The operatives of the Department of Dark Powers' Office of Secret Operations, craven creatures with paws and sunken chests covered with thin hair, are capable of declaring, "I may be an insignificant being, but I'm a useful cog in a big machine, and I'm proud of that!"

And shaping the antic, tragic and philosophic elements throughout Dezhnev's tale is a sorrowful and deep love for Russia itself, this "barbaric and dark and impenetrable land." Lukary shares this passion. When asked why he is so attached to "this unhappy country," he replies, as Dezhnev might, that there, "everything is more meaningful and intense."

The head of secret operations at one point says that Russia no longer exists, that three generations under Soviet rule have turned it into a land peopled by the "spiritual heirs of prison guards and informers," and that all that remains of its former self is its name.

This grim prognosis, like much information promulgated by this questionable source, is clearly in error. The very existence of "In Concert Performance" proves otherwise. As long as Russians produce literature this complex, this rich and knowing, Russia -- at least in the world of letters -- remains a force to be reckoned with.